American Bison

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{{Taxobox | color = pink | name = American Bison | status = Conservation status: Lower risk | image = American bison.jpg | image_width = 200px | image_caption = Alternate image
Historic drawing
Bison call audio | regnum = Animalia | phylum = Chordata | classis = Mammalia | ordo = Artiodactyla | familia = Bovidae | subfamilia = Bovinae | genus = Bison | species = B. bison | binomial = Bison bison | binomial_authority = Linnaeus, 1758 | subdivision_ranks = Subspecies | subdivision = B. b. athabasacae
B. b. bison }}

The American Bison (Bison bison), is a bovine mammal that is the largest terrestrial mammal in North America, and one of the largest wild cattles in the world. With their huge bulk, wood bison, which is the largest subspecies in North America, is only surpassed in size by the massive Asian gaur and wild water buffalo, both are found mainly in India. The bison inhabited the Great Plains of the United States and Canada in massive herds, ranging from the Great Slave Lake in Canada's far north to Mexico in the south, and from eastern Oregon almost to the Atlantic Ocean, taking its subspecies into account. Its two subspecies are the Plains Bison (Bison bison bison), distinguished by its flat back, and the Wood Bison (Bison bison athabascae), distinguished by its large humped back.

The Bison is also commonly known as the American Buffalo, although it is only distantly related to either the Water Buffalo or African Buffalo.

1 Physiology
2 Reproductive habits
3 Native hunting
4 Buffalo Trails
5 The "Buffalo Hunt"
6 Comeback
- 6.1 Bison hunting today
7 Bison today
8 Dangers
9 References
10 Native American names for bison
11 External links

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Physiology

Bison have a shaggy, dark brown winter coat, and a lighter weight, lighter brown summer coat. Bison can reach up to 2 meters (6 1/2 feet) tall, 3.6 meters (10 ft) long and weigh between 450 kg - 900 kg (2200 Lbs). The biggest specimens can weigh over 1000kg. The heads and forequarters are massive, and both sexes have short, curved horns, which they use in fighting for status within the herd and defense. Bison mate in August and September; a single reddish-brown calf is born the following spring, and nurses for a year. Bison are mature at three years of age, and have a life expectancy of 18–22 years, or 35 to 40 years in captivity.

The white buffalo is a rarely-occurring condition caused by a recessive gene, where an animal is born with reddish-brown fur that turns white as they mature. The animal is not a true albino, for its eye-color is normal. Compare spirit bear.

Image:Buffalo Bizon.jpg

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Reproductive habits

Their mating habits are polygynous: Dominant bulls maintain a small harem of females for mating. Individual bulls "tend" females until allowed to mate, following them around and chasing away rival males.

Homosexual behavior— including courtship and mounting between bulls—is common among bison. The Mandan nation Okipa festival concludes with a ceremonial enactment of this behavior, to "ensure the return of the buffalo in the coming season." Inter-sexual bison also occur. The Lakota refer to them as pte winkte —pte meaning bison and winkte designating two-spirit— thereby drawing an explicit parallel between transgender in animals and people. (Bruce Bagemihl, Whole Earth, 2000) See Homosexuality in animals.

Calves are born with a light brown to red fur coat which darkens as the animal matures. One very rare condition results in the white buffalo, where the calf turns entirely white. It is not to be confused with albino, since white buffalo still possess pigment in the skin, hair, and eyes. White buffalo are considered sacred by many Native Americans.

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Native hunting

The American Bison is a relative newcomer to North America, having originated in Eurasia and migrated over the Bering Strait. About 10,000 years ago it replaced the Long-horned Bison (Bison priscus), a previous immigrant that was much larger. It is thought that the Long-horned Bison may have gone extinct due to a changing ecosystem and hunting pressure following the development of the Clovis point and related technology, and improved hunting skills. During this same period, other megafauna vanished, to be replaced to some degree by immigrant Eurasian animals that were better adapted to predatory humans. The American Bison, technically a dwarf form, was one of these animals. Another was the Brown Bear, which replaced the Short-Faced Bear.

Bison were a keystone species, whose grazing pressure was a force that shaped the ecology of the Great Plains as strongly as periodic prairie fires and which were central to the lifestyle of Native Americans of the Great Plains. But there is now some controversy over their interaction. "Hernando De Soto's expedition staggered through the Southeast for four years in the early sixteenth century and saw hordes of people but apparently didn't see a single bison," Charles C. Mann writes in 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus. Mann discusses the evidence that Native Americans not only created (by selective use of fire) the large grasslands that provided the bison's ideal habitat, but also kept the bison population regulated. In this theory, it was only when the Indian population was decimated by wave after wave of epidemic (from diseases of Europeans) after the 16th century that the bison herds propagated wildly. In such a view, the seas of bison herds that stretched to the horizon were a symptom of an ecology out of balance, only rendered possible by decades of heavier-than-average rainfall.

What is not disputed is that before the introduction of horses, bison were herded into large chutes made of rocks and willow branches and then stampeded over cliffs. These bison jumps are found in several places in the US and Canada. This method of hunting appears to have come into use among Native Americans around the beginning of the Christian Era. Large groups of people would herd the bison for several miles, forcing them into a stampede that would ultimately drive many animals over a cliff. The large quantities of meat obtained in this way provided the hunters with surplus, which they could trade with other cultures.

A similar method of hunting was to drive the bison into natural corrals, such as Ruby site.

In order to get full use out of the bison, the Native Americans had a specific method of butchery, first identified at the Olsen-Chubbock archeological site in Colorado. The method involves skinning down the back in order to get at the tender meat just beneath the surface, the area known as the "hatched area." After the removal of the hatched area, the front legs are cut off as well as the shoulder blades. Doing so exposes the hump meat (in the Wood Bison), as well as the meat of the ribs and the Bison's inner organs. After everything was exposed, the spine was then severed and the pelvis and hind legs removed. Finally, the neck and head were removed as one. This allowed for the tough meat to be dried and made into pemmican.

When the later Plains Indians got horses, it was found that a good horseman could easily lance or shoot enough bison to keep his tribe and family fed, as long as a herd was nearby. The bison provided meat, leather, sinew for bows, grease, dried dung for fires, and even the hooves could be boiled for glue. The Plains horse Indians were sometimes wasteful, taking mainly the tongue and hump meat, but their pressure on the herds was easily sustainable. When times were bad, Bison were consumed down to the last bit of marrow.

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Buffalo Trails

The first thoroughfares of North America, save for the time-obliterated paths of mastodon, musk-ox and Moundbuilders, were the traces made by buffalo and deer in seasonal migration and in quest of -- or between-feedinggrounds and salt licks. Many of these routes, hammered by countless hoofs instinctively following watersheds and the crests of ridges in avoidance of lower places' summer muck and winter snowdrifts, were followed by the Indians as courses to hunting grounds and as warriors' paths; were invaluable to explorers and adopted by pioneers. Buffalo traces were characteristically north and south; yet their major east-west trails -- through Cumberland Gap; along the New York watershed; from the Potomac River through the Allegheny divide to the Ohio River headwaters; through the Blue Ridge Mountains to upper Kentucky - anticipated the courses of trunk railways. And in Senator Thomas Benton's phrase saluting these sagacious pathmakers, the buffalo blazed the way for the railroads to the Pacific.

Source: Dictionary of American History by James Truslow Adams, New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1940

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The "Buffalo Hunt"

Image:Bison skull pile, ca1870.png Bison were hunted almost to extinction in the 19th century and were reduced to a few hundred individuals by the mid-1880s, from which all the present day's managed herds are descended. One major cause was that hunters were paid by large railroad concerns to destroy entire herds, for several reasons:

The herds formed the basis of the economies of local Plains tribes of Native Americans; without bison, the tribes would leave.
Herds of these large animals on tracks could damage locomotives when the trains failed to stop in time.
Herds often took shelter in the artificial cuts formed by the grade of the track winding though hills and mountains in harsh winter conditions. This could hold up a train for days.

Besides this, bison skins were valuable for industrial machine belts, clothing such as robes, and rugs. There was a huge export trade to Europe of bison hides. Old West bison hunting was very often a big commercial enterprise, involving organized teams of one or two professional hunters, backed by a team of skinners, gun cleaners, cartridge reloaders, cooks, wranglers, blacksmiths, security guards, teamsters, and large numbers of horse and wagons. Men were even employed to recover and re-cast lead bullets taken from the carcasses. Many of these professional hunters such as Buffalo Bill Cody killed over a hundred animals at a single stand and many thousands in their career. One professional hunter killed over 20,000 by his own count. A good hide could bring $3.00 in Dodge City, and a very good one (the heavy winter coat) $50.00 in an era when a laborer would be lucky to make a dollar a day.

For a decade from 1873 on there were several hundred, perhaps over a thousand, such commercial hunting outfits harvesting bison at any one time, vastly exceeding the take by American Indians or indivdual meat hunters. It was said that the Big .50s were fired so much that hunters needed at least two rifles to let the barrels cool off, and they were sometimes quenched in the winter snow.

As the great herds began to wane, proposals to protect the bison came up. Cody, among others, spoke in favor of protecting the bison as he saw that the pressure on the species was too great. But these were discouraged, as it was recognized that the Plains Indians, often at war with the United States, depended on bison for their way of life. General Phillip Sheridan spoke to the Texas Legislature against a proposal to outlaw commercial bison hunting for that reason, and President Grant also "pocket vetoed" a similar Federal bill to protect the dwindling bison herds. By 1884 the American Bison was close to extinction.

The destruction of the bison was resisted by many of the Plains Indians, but not with success. The Indians did not participate in commercial hunting of the bison.

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Comeback

Image:Bison bison.jpg As few as 750 bison existed in 1890. The Bronx Zoo maintained a captive herd, some of which was transported in the early 20th century to Yellowstone National Park to bolster its faltering indigenous herd (which poaching had reduced to a few dozen animals), joining with transplants from other wildlife preserves. Some of these came from Charles Goodnight's ranch in the Texas Panhandle.

A variety of privately-owned herds have also been established, starting from this population. The current American Bison population has been growing rapidly and is estimated at 350,000, but this is compared to an estimated 60–100 million during the 2nd quarter of the 19th century. Current herds, however, are all partly crossbred with cattle (see "beefalo"); today there are only four genetically unmixed herds, and only one that is also free of brucellosis: it roams Wind Cave National Park. A founder population from the Wind Cave herd was recently established in Montana by WWF, the World Wildlife Fund.

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Bison hunting today

Small-scale hunting is allowed currently in some areas. In Montana, cattle ranchers are concerned about the spread of brucellosis to their cattle from infected bison that are wandering outside of the boundaries of Yellowstone Park. In 2005, a limited public bison hunt with 50 licenses was established, suspended, and re-established by the state.

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Bison today

Image:Bison.jpg Bison are now raised for meat and hides. Over 250,000 of the 350,000 remaining bison are being raised for human consumption. Bison meat is lower in fat and cholesterol than beef which has led to the development of beefalo, a fertile cross-breed of bison and domestic cattle. In 2005, about 35,000 bison were processed for meat in the U.S., with the National Bison Association and USDA providing a "Certified American Buffalo" program with birth-to-consumer tracking of bison via RFID ear tags.

Recent genetic studies of privately-owned herds of bison show that many of them include animals with genes from domestic cattle; there are as few as 12,000 to 15,000 pure bison in the world. The numbers are uncertain because the tests so far used mitochondrial DNA analysis, and thus would miss cattle genes inherited in the male line; most of the hybrids look exactly like purebred bison.

Image:United States 2005 bison nickel, reverse.jpg The American Bison was depicted on the reverse side of the U.S. "buffalo nickel" from 1913 to 1938. In 2005 the United States Mint coined a nickel with a new depiction of the bison as part of its "Westward Journey" series and the Kansas quarter with a depiction of the bison on its reverse as part of its "50 State Quarter" series. The Kansas State Quarter only has the bison and does not feature any writing, the only one like this so far.

The bison is a symbol of Manitoba, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, Bucknell University, the University of Colorado, Lipscomb University, Marshall University, the Independence Party of Minnesota, and North Dakota State University. It is also commonly used as a symbol of the City of Buffalo, New York although the city was not named for the animal. The bison is also the state mammal of Wyoming.

Custer State Park in South Dakota is home to 1500 bison, one of the largest publicly-held herds in the world.

A proposal known as Buffalo Commons has been suggested by a handful of academics and policymakers to restore large parts of the drier portion of the Great Plains to native prairie grazed by bison. Proponents argue that current agricultural use of the shortgrass prairie is not sustainable, pointing to periodic disasters such as the Dust Bowl and continuing significant population loss over the last 60 years. However, this plan is opposed by virtually everyone who lives in the area and has never advanced beyond preliminary studies.

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Dangers

Bison are among the most dangerous animals encountered by visitors to the various National Parks, especially Yellowstone National Park. While they are not carnivorous, they will attack humans if provoked. Appearing slow, on account of their rather lethargic movements, they are actually quite capable of outrunning humans— they have been observed running as fast as 45 mph (73 km/h). They should generally be considered as dangerous as bears. People have been trampled and gored by bison in the national parks. Bison also have the ability, unexpected given the animal's size and body structure, to jump straight up.

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